Egypt (La Mort de Philae) eBook

Behold me then, for some two or three hours, alone
among the temples of the Pharaohs. The tourists,
whom the carriages and donkeys are at this moment
taking back to the hotels of Luxor, will not return
till very late, when the full moon will have risen
and be shedding its clear light upon the ruins.
My post, while I waited, was high up among the ruins
on the margin of the sacred Lake of Osiris, the still
and enclosed water of which is astonishing in that
it has remained there for so many centuries.
It still conceals, no doubt, numberless treasures confided
to it in the days of slaughters and pillages, when
the armies of the Persian and Nubian kings forced
the thick, surrounding walls.

In a few minutes, thousands of stars appear at the
bottom of this water, reflecting symmetrically the
veritable ones which now scintillate everywhere in
the heavens. A sudden cold spreads over the town-mummy,
whose stones, still warm from their exposure to the
sun, cool very rapidly in this nocturnal blue which
envelops them as in a shroud. I am free to wander
where I please without risk of meeting anyone, and
I begin to descend by the steps made by the falling
of the granite blocks, which have formed on all sides
staircases as if for giants. On the overturned
surfaces, my hands encounter the deep, clear-cut hollows
of the hieroglyphs, and sometimes of those inevitable
people, carved in profile, who raise their arms, all
of them, and make signs to one another. On arriving
at the bottom I am received by a row of statues with
battered faces, seated on thrones, and without hindrance
of any kind, and recognising everything in the blue
transparency which takes the place of day, I come
to the great avenue of the palaces of Amen.

We have nothing on earth in the least degree comparable
to this avenue, which passive multitudes took nearly
three thousand years to construct, expending, century
after century, their innumerable energies in carrying
these stones, which our machines now could not move.
And the objective was always the same: to prolong
indefinitely the perspectives of pylons, colossi and
obelisks, continuing always this same artery of temples
and palaces in the direction of the old Nile—­while
the latter, on the contrary, receded slowly, from
century to century, towards Libya. It is here,
and especially at night, that you suffer the feeling
of having been shrunken to the size of a pygmy.
All round you rise monoliths mighty as rocks.
You have to take twenty paces to pass the base of a
single one of them. They are placed quite close
together, too close, it seems, in view of their enormity
and mass. There is not enough air between them,
and the closeness of their juxtaposition disconcerts
you more, perhaps, even than their massiveness.